What a Woman! [The Beautiful Cheat] ** (1943, Rosalind Russell, Brian Aherne, Willard Parker, Ann Savage, Alan Dinehart) – Classic Movie Review 12,223

Ann Savage features with Rosalind Russell in What a Woman!, one of a dozen films with Savage released in 1943. Director Irving Cummings’s 1943 American romantic comedy film What a Woman! [The Beautiful Cheat] is made by Columbia Pictures, and stars Rosalind Russell, Brian Aherne, Willard Parker, Ann Savage, and Alan Dinehart.

Romance and comedy combine in this frolicsome tale of Carol Ainsley (Rosalind Russell), a writer’s agent torn between a reporter called Henry Pepper (Brian Aherne) writing a profile on the agent, and an academic named Michael Cobb (Willard Parker), her star client.

It is all predictable, air-headed stuff, but lifted by a beautifully timed performance by Russell at her best, and the smooth handling.

The screenplay by Therese Lewis and Barry Trivers is based on an original story by Erik Charell.

The cast are Rosalind Russell as Carol Ainsley, Brian Aherne as Henry Pepper, Willard Parker as Michael Cobb, Alan Dinehart as Pat O’Shea, Edward Fielding as Senator Howard Ainsley, Ann Savage as Jane Drake, Norma Varden as Miss Timmons, Douglas Wood as Dean Alfred B Shaeffer, Grady Sutton as Mr Clark, and Irving Bacon.

Ann Savage’s blonde hair was reddened for Footlight Glamour (1943). She joined Joan Davis and Jinx Falkenburg in Two Senoritas from Chicago (1943) and starred (as a brunette) in the first of several films with Tom Neal in Klondike Kate (1943).

Savage and Neal did not see eye-to-eye but they starred together in Two Man Submarine and The Unwritten Code (both 1944) before their most famous film, the 1945 film noir Detour. Afterwards, although Savage starred in a half-dozen more films during the later 1940s – including Scared Stiff (1945), The Spider (1945), The Dark Horse (1946), and Satan’s Cradle (1949) – her busiest years were over.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,223

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